As you might expect with the change of government, the on-your-bike brigade are having a field day. This time they're trying to reclaim our cities for the exclusive use of the rich and powerful. If you're unlucky enough to be a city dweller and out of work, you can sling your hook and go and live on the edge of town until you're rich enough to be allowed back in.

The proposed cuts to local housing allowances and total welfare benefits – which will include housing benefit – risk having the effect of creating an inverse of what urban scholars call doughnut cities, with rich, underpopulated centres and dense, poor outskirts. Paris is the axiomatic doughnut, its grand central boulevards forming affluent spokes that lead out towards the peripheral ring road, beyond which the poor and the not sufficiently French-looking are housed in high-rise ghettoes.

The peripheral road forms both a real and perceived barrier between the banlieues – the outer estates – and the opportunities of the city. Having grown up on a purpose-built estate 45 minutes from the centre of Birmingham, I know from experience that the road needn't really exist, because the forcefield created by stigma, in an atmosphere of dislocation, poverty and defeat, was enough to do the job. Of course I went into Birmingham – the bus ride was a minor inconvenience (though now an expensive one). But nothing could overcome the sense that, a few years before my birth, families had been lobbed out to the cusp of city and country and left to cope with the consequences of removal from work, family and routine.

Peripheral areas are emphatically not the same as suburbs: you move to the suburbs out of choice, once you have weighed up the cons against the pros. Outer estates are where people are sent, or where you go when choices are so limited as to seem nonexistent. They are often literally cut off from the wider economy because of poor public transport and poor availability of local jobs. They create the conditions in which people can turn inwards, away from the world, away from confidence: a kind of simultaneous agoraphobia and claustrophobia.

A venomous few will savour images of the workshy being banished for their idleness. The problem is that most people who qualify for means-tested benefits do work: they simply don't earn enough to live without benefits. The Tories' plans will make renting in the inner London boroughs, for instance, unaffordable even for those earning the London living wage of £7.85 an hour.

However, the coalition plans to triple funding for discretionary arrangements so that local authorities can, in the Department for Work and Pension's words, "provide either a transitional safety net for customers who need to find alternative accommodation or longer term support for customers who are less able to move".

In other words, this supposedly draconian cap will not eradicate those rare situations – which nevertheless capture the lion's share of tabloid stories on housing and welfare – in which families are able to claim thousands of pounds a month for housing because a suitable council home can't be found for them. Meanwhile, the average housing benefit paid to a claimant in private rented housing is a less inflammatory £109 a week (about a third more in London); in social housing, it's about £75.

It was the Conservatives who created the now indelible connection between social tenancy and benefit dependency in the first place, by deliberately reducing the amount of council housing available. This needn't have been the case: had local authorities been allowed to replace the housing lost through the right to buy there wouldn't have been the need to restrict social housing availability to the poorest and most needy.

People move around for work all the time – but only once they have weighed the potential benefits against the disadvantages of moving away from their friends, family, other forms of social support and, simply, familiarity. In other words they choose for themselves, which is precisely what the Tories claim to want for all us. To place a financial cap on how far the government will support you to live among friends and family, in a place you know well and feel connected to, is to suggest that community does not matter. Looks rather odd in the context of the "big society", doesn't it?